Adorable animals thread - Actual

Jormungandr

Jormungandr

The Midgard Wyrm
Founder
willdelve4beer said:
Hippos do look cute and poochy...,

...until you see a skeleton of one, specifically the skull.

Then you realize that these river dwelling, saber-toothed, murder-machines must have been ripped from some D&D monster manual and given a half-assed kid-friendly reskin before public release.

If anything that wasn't so poochy had such a massive killcount, we would be hunting and eating them, the way we do with gators.
Click to expand...
People joke that millions of years from now, archeologists and anthropologists will look at the skulls of various species, including us, and depict us as looking like abominations and monsters -- basically what we've done with the dinosaurs, haha.

Hell, a fucking child's skull has all its teeth ready in its jaw, ready to pop out. To an outsider, a kid's skull looks like some sort of Lovecraftian abomination.
 
W

willdelve4beer

Well-known member
Jormungandr said:
People joke that millions of years from now, archeologists and anthropologists will look at the skulls of various species, including us, and depict us as looking like abominations and monsters -- basically what we've done with the dinosaurs, haha.

Hell, a fucking child's skull has all its teeth ready in its jaw, ready to pop out. To an outsider, a kid's skull looks like some sort of Lovecraftian abomination.
Click to expand...

...clearly was the result of a hideous bio-weapons program, splicing the commoner landbound homosapiens with their seaborne overlords to create a taskmaster janissary species...


Dr Rac C. Oon, Alpha Centauri University, deep history archaeologist.
 
S

ShadowArxxy

Well-known member
Comrade
Jormungandr said:
People joke that millions of years from now, archeologists and anthropologists will look at the skulls of various species, including us, and depict us as looking like abominations and monsters -- basically what we've done with the dinosaurs, haha.

Hell, a fucking child's skull has all its teeth ready in its jaw, ready to pop out. To an outsider, a kid's skull looks like some sort of Lovecraftian abomination.
Click to expand...

To be fair, the sort of high fidelity predictive modeling of muscle estimates from the underlying bone attachment points that is used to generate the best visions of dinosaurs that current science can produce are *incredibly* sophisticated. The limitations of previous renderings are *not* a matter of prior generations of archaeologists and paleontologists being stupid, but simply having vastly more limited tools to work with.
 
Bassoe

Bassoe

Well-known member
willdelve4beer said:
Hippos do look cute and poochy...,

...until you see a skeleton of one, specifically the skull.

Then you realize that these river dwelling, saber-toothed, murder-machines must have been ripped from some D&D monster manual and given a half-assed kid-friendly reskin before public release.

If anything that wasn't so poochy had such a massive killcount, we would be hunting and eating them, the way we do with gators.
Click to expand...
Jormungandr said:
People joke that millions of years from now, archeologists and anthropologists will look at the skulls of various species, including us, and depict us as looking like abominations and monsters -- basically what we've done with the dinosaurs, haha.

Hell, a fucking child's skull has all its teeth ready in its jaw, ready to pop out. To an outsider, a kid's skull looks like some sort of Lovecraftian abomination.
Click to expand...
willdelve4beer said:
...clearly was the result of a hideous bio-weapons program, splicing the commoner landbound homosapiens with their seaborne overlords to create a taskmaster janissary species...


Dr Rac C. Oon, Alpha Centauri University, deep history archaeologist.
Click to expand...
For further details, see C. M. Kosemen's satirical speculative evolution classic All Todays (not to be confused with his other work, All Tomorrows which is about posthumans), in which he takes the skeletons of modern animals and the perspective of a paleontologist belonging to earth's next sentient species and assembles them wrong on purpose. Cue mosquito-hummingbirds, flightless swans with scything talons, trunk-less elephants with resemble wild boars, aquatic sloths and cattle with dimetrodon spines.
 
S

ShadowArxxy

Well-known member
Comrade
Bassoe said:
For further details, see C. M. Kosemen's satirical speculative evolution classic All Todays (not to be confused with his other work, All Tomorrows which is about posthumans), in which he takes the skeletons of modern animals and the perspective of a paleontologist belonging to earth's next sentient species and assembles them wrong on purpose. Cue mosquito-hummingbirds, flightless swans with scything talons, trunk-less elephants with resemble wild boars, aquatic sloths and cattle with dimetrodon spines.
Click to expand...

It's the rhino that has "dimetrodon spines", and that's actually because a rhino's skeleton does indeed have an actual 'sail' of extended vertebral spines just like a Dimetrodon or Spinosaurus does. It's just in the actual animal, this sail is almost entirely hidden by fat and muscle so it just manifests as a small shoulder hump.

"Shrink wrapping" dinosaurs is incorrect, but it's literally because they didn't have the technology to even remotely derive muscle size, and even today purely soft tissue elements can't be predicted with any reliability. We only know about the purely soft tissue structures of real life animals *because we have actual examples* from those species or closely related ones.

The sketches done for serious professional purposes back in the day chose to shrink wrap because they knew they didn't know what the muscle and fat looked like and wanted to minimize speculative content, and the more fanciful pop culture renderings went on from those.

Edit: Just to illustrate, this is a rhino's skeleton versus its body shape. You *really* would not imagine that shape from skeletal evidence alone without already knowing what rhinos look like, especially if the skeleton was partial fragments.

 
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Husky_Khan

Husky_Khan

The Dog Whistler... I mean Whisperer.
Founder
Apparently there was a moment in time when Hollywood actors Norman Reedus and Keanu Reeves were on motorcycles riding through Utah and visiting an animal rescue facility where teams of dogs simulated sled pulling as exercise.

 
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